"Bruce Sterling - My Rihla (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

silk in Qanjanfu, China, whose brother sold tangeri

nes
in Fez (or fezzes in Tangier, presumably, when he got
the chance). "How far apart they are," Ibn Battuta
commented mildly. It was not remarkable.
Travel was hazardous, and, of course, very slow.
But the trade routes were open, the caravanserais--
giant government-supported hotels, sometimes capable
of housing thousands--were doing a brisk trade from
Cairo to Delhi to Samarkand. The locals were generally
friendly, and respectful of learned men--sometimes, so
delighted to see foreigners that they fell upon them
with sobs of delight and fought for the prestige of
entertaining them.
Professor Ross Dunn's narrative of _The
Adventures of Ibn Battuta_ made excellent, and perhaps
weirdly apt, reading last April, as I was traveling
some thirty thousand feet above the North Atlantic in
the boozy tin-can comfort of a KLM 747.
"God made the world, but the Dutch made
Holland." This gross impiety would have shocked the
sufi turban off the valorous Ibn Battuta, but we live
today, to paraphrase Greg Bear, in a world of things
so monstrous that they have gone past sin and become
necessity. Large and prosperous sections of the
Netherlands exist well below sea level. God forbid the
rest of us should have to learn to copy this trick,
but when I read the greenhouse-warming statistics I
get a shuddery precognitive notion of myself as an
elderly civil-defense draftee, heaving sandbags at the
angry rising foam . . .
That's not a problem for the Dutch at the
moment. They do, however, currently find themselves
confronting another rising tide. "The manure surplus."
The Dutch are setting up a large government agro-
bureaucracy to monitor, transport, and recycle, er,
well, cowshit. They're very big on cheese, the Dutch,
but every time you slice yourself a tasty yellow wedge
of Gouda, there is somewhere, by definition, a
steaming heap of manure. A completely natural
substance, manure; nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous,
the very stuff of life--unless *there's too much of it

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in one place